In a common electronic form application scenario, an administrator may select among hundreds of forms that have been populated by an applicant (e.g., through an electronic interview process or through manual input) and submit these selected forms for processing by another party, such as an insurance carrier, a prospective employer, a government agency, a general contractor, etc. The administrator may, for example, select one set of forms to be submitted to a first party and bundle it into a single electronic document for submission to the first party. The administrator may then select a different set of forms to be submitted to a second party, also bundling this set into a single electronic document for submission.
Each form typically includes named form fields, which store the data provided by the applicant. Many forms also have program or script code that executes in association with each form. For example, a script might execute to copy nonstandard input into a standard format (e.g., “Oak St.” to “Oak Street”). Scripts typically reference one or more named form fields in the electronic document on which to operate.
In a system involving many different forms, it is common that different electronic form documents include form field names that are identical. For example, applicant name fields are named with common names across different forms (e.g., “Applicant_Last_Name”, “Applicant_First_Name”). However, in some environments, a bundling or merge operation does not accommodate the merger of two forms having identical form field names. Instead, during a merge operation, the first encountered form field having a shared name is overwritten by a subsequently encountered form field of the same name. As such, the data associated with the first encountered form field is lost.
Unfortunately, avoiding such overwriting by merely building the individual forms to include all unique form field names throughout a large number of forms presents a terrible management problem—similar but unique scripts for different forms would need to be customized for each form, unique form field names would need to be tracked across all forms, and different instances of the same form in the same bundle (e.g., one form for a primary applicant and the other form for the primary applicant's spouse) would still present the problem of common form field names in the bundle.